GOP leaders claim health-bill progress
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and GOP leaders insisted Tuesday that the Senate will vote soon on legislation to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But even as senators said they were making progress, deep uncertainty remained about whether the emerging legislation commands enough support to pass.
Meeting with Republican congressional leaders at the White House, Trump praised the House for passing its own version of the health legislation last month, and he encouraged the Senate to do to the same.
“The Senate, I’m sure, will follow suit and get a bill across the finish line this summer that will be great health care for Americans,” Trump said with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at his side. “And I’m looking forward to seeing it, so looking forward to seeing it.”
Earlier, GOP senators emerged from a lunch meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and claimed they were nearing consensus on their long-promised legislation to undo major parts of the health overhaul approved seven years ago by Democrats and former President Barack Obama. At the meeting, Republicans reviewed legislative options with the goal of translating those into bill language that could be evaluated in the near future by the Congressional Budget Office.
“We’re getting close to having a proposal to whip and to take to the floor. It’s been seven years to talk about health care,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters.
“Doing nothing is not an option,” McConnell said.
At the same time, it remained uncertain whether they would be able to pass a bill, enough so that they also spent time discussing a fallback plan that would involve a stopgap measure to stabilize insurance markets, senators said. This would give lawmakers more time to tackle broader health care system problems. With Democrats unanimously opposed to the GOP plans, Republicans can lose only two votes and still pass a bill.
“I would support short-
term measures that stabilize markets and give us time,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “It’s a very complex system. We don’t have time to do this in a couple of weeks.”
Republicans and Trump himself are eager to move on to other issues, particularly a tax overhaul, after health care has monopolized the House and then the Senate for the past several months.
Despite years of promises to get rid of Obama’s health law, Republicans discovered that doing so was much more difficult than expected. The legislation that passed in the House has few fans in the Senate. Though it’s projected to reduce the deficit and result in lower premiums for some consumers over time, it’s also forecast to kick 23 million people off the insurance rolls over a decade.
Republican aides say privately that they are working within the general framework of the House bill but considering significant changes. For example, it’s expected that the Senate legislation would set a limit on future federal spending for Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for low-income people. As in the House bill, the Senate is considering a per-person spending limit, known as a per-capita cap.
But among the options being considered by the Senate would be exempting from the cap the spending for some categories of Medicaid beneficiaries. Some Republican governors have proposed that the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women and children be exempted from any cap.
Other options being considered would change the tax credits the House bill offers to help people purchase private health insurance. In the House bill, tax credits are based primarily on age. But senators are also considering other factors, such as income and where a person lives. Health care costs vary dramatically around the country.